The present invention relates to methods and tools for mapping between ontologies in computer systems. Software development increasingly depends on industry standards, ontologies and various industry models. However, development productivity is often impeded by a lack of mapping or alignment between different industry-specific models. For example, a company may have a legacy, proprietary banking ontology, which is substantially different from a provider's banking ontology, such as, for example the Industry FrameWork (IFW) ontology for banking, provided by International Business Machines Inc. of Armonk, N.Y.
There are automated industry mapping tools for generating an alignment between different ontologies. For example a mapping which indicates that the terms “Order” and “Purchase,” respectively, represent the same entities in two different ontologies. However, these automated mapping tools often have a high error rate, which can lead to decreased productivity and increasing development costs. A significant percentage of such errors relate to model entities that do not conform to regular naming conventions. For example, instead of using an entity “Customer” that has an association labeled “has” to an entity “Order”, a source industry model may use an entity “CustomerOrder.” Such an entity can be referred to as a “relationship entity”.
Relationship entities may cause errors in the mapping process because the documentation for a relationship entity often refers to both the entities that participate in the relationship. For example, when mapping a source industry model that includes a “CustomerOrder” relationship entity, the industry mapping tool may incorrectly map “CustomerOrder” to “Customer” or to “Order” in the destination industry model when, in fact, “CustomerOrder” should not be mapped to either of these entities. In this example, the error is caused by the industry mapping tool incorrectly relying on “customer” and “order” keywords in the documentation of the “CustomerOrder” relationship entity. Many other similar examples exist. Thus, it would be beneficial to find a solution that eliminates or reduces such problems.